Part 44 (2/2)

Death looked at him, a long look. The kid wasn't stupid, Sammy knew. None of these people were stupid, not Wiener, not the kid, not the goths who led each other around Fantasyland on leashes. Not the fatkins who'd soon pack the place. They were none of them stupid. They were just -- soft. Unwilling to make the hard choices. Sammy was good at hard choices.

Perry got home that night and walked in on Lester and Suzanne. They were tangled on the living-room carpet, mostly naked, and Lester blushed right to his a.s.s-cheeks when Perry came through the door.

”Sorry, sorry!” Lester called as he grabbed a sofa cus.h.i.+on and pa.s.sed it to Suzanne, then got one for himself. Perry averted his eyes and tried not to laugh.

”Jesus, guys, what's wrong with the bedroom?”

”We would've gotten there eventually,” Lester said as he helped Suzanne to her feet. Perry pointedly turned to face the wall. ”You were supposed to be at dinner with the gang,” Lester said.

”Close-up on the ride was crazy. Everything was changing and the printers were out of goop. Lots of action on the network -- Boston and San Francisco are introducing a lot of new items to the ride. By the time I got to the guest-house, the Kettlewells were already putting the kids to bed.” He decided not to mention Eva's angry storm-out to Suzanne. No doubt she had already figured out that all was not well in the House of Kettlewell.

Suzanne ahem'd.

”Sorry, sorry,” Lester said. ”Let's talk about this later, OK? Sorry.”

They scurried off to Lester's room and Perry whipped out a computer, put on some short humor videos in shuffle-mode, and grabbed a big tub of spare parts he kept around to fiddle with. It could be soothing to take apart and rea.s.semble a complex mechanism, and sometimes you got ideas from it.

Five minutes later, he heard the shower running and then Suzanne came into the living room.

”I'm going to order some food. What do you feel like?”

”Whatever you get, you'll have to order it from one of the fatkins places. It's not practical to feed Lester any other way. Get me a small chicken tikka pizza.”

She pored over the stack of menus in the kitchen. ”Does Food in Twenty Minutes really deliver in 20 minutes?”

”Usually 15. They do most of the prep in the vans and use a lot of predictive math in their routing. There's usually a van within about ten minutes of here, no matter what the traffic. They deliver to traffic-jams, too, on scooters.”

Suzanne made a face. ”I thought *Russia* was weird.” She showed the number on the brochure to her phone and then started to order.

Lester came out a minute later, dressed to the nines as always. He was barely capable of entering his bedroom without effecting a wardrobe change.

He gave Perry a slightly p.i.s.sed off look and Perry shrugged apologetically, though he didn't feel all that bad. Lester's fault.

Christ on a bike, it was weird to think of the two of them together, especially going at it on the living room rug like a couple of h.o.r.n.y teens. Suzanne had always been the grownup in their little family. But that had been back when there was a big company involved. Something about being a piece of a big company made you want to act like you'd always figured grownups should act. Once you were a free agent, there wasn't any reason not to embrace your urges.

When the food came, the two of them attacked it like hungry dogs. It was clear that they'd forgotten their embarra.s.sment and were planning another retreat to the bedroom once they'd refueled. Perry left.

”Hey, Francis.” Francis was sitting on the second-storey balcony of his mayoral house, surveying the electric glow of the shantytown. As usual now, he was alone, without any of his old gang of boys hanging around him. He waved an arm toward Perry and beckoned him inside, buzzing him in with his phone.

Perry tracked up the narrow stairs, wondering how Francis negotiated them with his bad knee and his propensity to have one beer too many.

”What's the good word?”

”Oh, not much,” Perry said. He helped himself to a beer. They made it in the shantytown and fortified it with fruits, like a Belgian beer. The resulting suds were strong and sweet. This one was raspberry and it tasted a little pink, like red soda.

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